Work for 40 years, retire on the pension you earned — and after that, according to the billionaire CEO of Shopify, you shouldn’t be allowed to vote anymore.
Tobi Lütke’s argument, posted on X on July 26: a pension deal is a guarantee, a guarantee makes you a dependent, and dependents don’t vote; “just like dependents under age.” Leave it, he wrote, to people with a stake in the future. (To be clear, all American citizens aged 18 or over have the right to vote. Financial independence is not the rationale for voting eligibility. The vote was extended to all 18-year-olds via the 26th Amendment in 1971 on the basis that anyone who can be drafted into the military should be able to exercise the vote).
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The thread got worse from there. Two hours later, an account posting as Eric Thor proposed weighing every citizen’s vote by income tax paid: zero votes if you owe nothing, one vote if you pay up to $100,000; up to 5 votes if you’re a top taxpayer paying $500,000 or more each year. In the U.S., that would only apply to those earning millions per year.
Lütke’s answer ran two words. “Good system.”
Lütke runs one of the most valuable companies on the Toronto Stock Exchange and sits at No. 302 on Forbes’ 2026 billionaires list. Shopify, an Ottawa-based payments giant, also trades on the Nasdaq.
His pension post goes after retirees. Anyone whose retirement income is locked in should stop voting, he wrote, whether or not they still owe tax. If he’s speaking about the U.S., that would include 53.8 million retired workers the Social Security Administration counted in January.
The tiered plan he called a “good system” would draw its line somewhere else. It hands zero votes to any of the 40% of American households with no federal income tax bill — roughly 76 million of them in 2025, by Tax Policy Center estimates.
If your pension is locked in, or the standard deduction and credits wipe out what you owe, you’d be on the wrong side of Lütke’s line.
What Lütke was replying to
This online dust-up started during a conversation about two residential towers planned in San Francisco’s Marina district.
